September 28, 2011 • 20 mins
In 1908, a fire leveled the Indiana home of Belle Gunness. Four bodies were found in the cellar, and it seemed possible that Gunnes might have escaped. When about a dozen more bodies were found, Gunness was revealed as a serial killer.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a chocolate boarding and I'm fired out
and this topic the topic of this episode was a
suggestion from listener Jesse, and I feel like I should
(00:22):
say that because it's such a gruesome story. I don't
want Sarah to be mad at me for picking it.
It does have a decapitated body. Yeah, that's true. Are
you putting that in the plus category? No, that's not
why I selected it. I selected it because it was
a listener's suggestion, and it is an interesting story. It's
a fascinating mystery, and you know how we love those.
(00:43):
It starts, at least for most of the world, this
is when it started with a fire that took place
the morning of April eight at a small farm just
outside of Laporte, Indiana, which was then a town of
about ten thousand, about sixty miles from Chicago, and the
farm was owned by a widow named Bell Gunness, and
her home there was completely destroyed by the fire. But
(01:06):
it was after the fire that the real mystery started.
So four charred bodies were found in the cellar and
three appeared to be the bodies of Gunnis's children, Myrtle Sorensen,
Lucy Sorensen, and Philip Gunnis, who were eleven, nine and
five years old, respectively. The fourth body, though, was kind
of a puzzle, and like I said, that's where the
(01:29):
mystery really started. Yeah. First, people assumed that the body
was Gunnesses. Makes sense, right, It's a woman's body, and
Gonnas live there, so you imagine that she would be
there with her kids. But there were a couple of
problems right off the bat. People thought that the body
seemed a little too small to be bell. She was
a woman of some stature. Let's say she was about
(01:51):
five eight and approximately two thirty pounds, and this body
appeared to belong to someone who was much shorter and lighter.
It was also missing head, making it even harder to
confirm the identity. I should correct my earlier statement. This
is why I thought you might have selected because of
the head. I know you like missing heads, but only
with the ned Kelly things. Okay, okay, well, and Henry
(02:12):
the fourth too. Whoops, Okay, never mind. But what really
made people suspicious about this this find was the arrival
of a man named awful Hell Glen who came on
the scene looking for his brother Andrew, and he said
that Andrew had been corresponding with Bell and insisted that
(02:33):
the police searched the property and a look for this
missing brother. What they found, though, was really disturbing, Andrew's
dismembered body plus the body of a lot of other people.
So listener Jesse commented on what a media storm the
story would have created if it had happened today. But
it actually started a bit of a media frenzy back
(02:53):
then too, as more bodies were dug up and it
became more and more clear that Bell had been a
ruthless kill or. Newspapers gave her catchy nicknames like the
Mistress of Murder Hill and Lady blue Beard. But who
was Bell Gunnis really and why and how did she
kill all of these people? And another question, which is
(03:15):
probably one of the main questions that people want to
know now, did she really die in that nine eight fire.
So we're gonna look at all of the stuff, but
we're gonna start with that first question. Who was Bell Gunnis?
So we don't know too much about Bell Gunnis's early life,
except that she was born in a small village in
Norway on November eighteen fifty nine, and her name was
(03:35):
originally Brynhild, Paul's daughter store Set, and her family was
very poor, and several sources actually suggest that her father
may have been a Stonemason and that she probably had
to work as a farm hand at an early age
to help her family make ends meet. But what we
do know is that sometime in or shortly after eight
(03:56):
bryn Hild immigrated to the United States in her early twenties,
specifically to Chicago, and changed her name to Bell. She
had a sister named Nelly Larson who had immigrated to
Chicago office, so she had a connection there. But she
again returned to pretty grueling work. Yeah, and again we
don't know too much about those first years in the
(04:17):
United States for Bell, but we do know that she
probably worked as a house servant, which would have been
pretty tough work, and she probably didn't like it very much,
because her sister was later quoted as saying, quote Bell
was crazy for money, and working as a house servant
would not have afforded her much of that. By about
eighteen eighty four, she married a man named Max Mad's
(04:38):
Sorenson who was also a Norwegian immigrant, but that wouldn't
have really been her ticket to instant wealth either though.
He was a department store detective and later worked for
the Chicago Railroad. In the eight nineties, they opened up
a confectioner shop in downtown Chicago, but that wasn't very successful.
It was, however, ensured. Oh indeed, the building and actually
(05:00):
really burned down around a year into their business venture,
and after that they were able to collect a little
bit of insurance money. Maybe it doesn't seem like such
a big deal on the surface, but this kicked off
a pattern for Bell that would probably raise a few
red flags today. In eight the Sorenson's house also burned down,
and they collected insurance money for that, and the couple's
(05:20):
first two kids, who were also insured, died in infancy,
officially of acute colitis, but now looking back, people say
the symptoms are similar to if they had been poisoned. Okay, so,
even if you look at all of that is just
really really bad luck or really weird coincidence, what happens
next has to make you a little bit suspicious at least,
(05:44):
so mad Sorenson dies on July n which just happens
to be the one day that to life insurance policies
from different mutual associations overlapped. Officially, the cause of death
was heart failure, but his symptoms actually indicated strychnine poisoning.
And the insurance payout because of those two policies was
(06:06):
pretty huge eight thousand, five hundred dollars, and that was
quite a large sum for the time, and it said
that Bell tried to go collect it just a day
after the funeral, so she was certainly not playing a
part of the grieving widow. It was probably suspicious that
there wasn't an autopsy. So Bell got the insurance money
and went on her way. She did. She used the
(06:28):
money actually to buy the farm on the outskirts of Laport,
and she moved there with three kids, Jenny, Myrtle, and Lucy.
And just an aside here about the kids. It's generally
accepted that Jenny, whose full name was probably Jenny Olson,
was a foster child, but some say that none of
Bell's children were her own. According to an article by
Ted Hartzel in American History, Bill's sister, Nellie Larson, once
(06:51):
said that Bell never had any children of her own,
though she would at times have as many as twelve
children in her care, So just an interesting thing to
think about as we go on. I mean, maybe there
was some money associated with fostering children, you know, maybe
you got some money from the government for that or something. Um.
You know, it's something that people don't focus on the
most when they're talking about Bell Gunnis, but it's something
(07:12):
that stuck out to me definitely in her story. It's unusual.
So in Bell married again and her second husband, this
time as a widower and a butcher by trade named
Peter Gunnis, who was also a native of Norway. And
Peter Gunnis came to the marriage with two kids already.
One was an infant named Jenny, and she mysteriously died
(07:33):
just a week after the wedding when she was home
alone with Bell, and the other was a five year
old girl. And after that incident with the baby, she
was removed from her father and Bell's care and taken
away by her uncle to Wisconsin. Peter Gunnis didn't really
last that much longer. Only eight months after the wedding,
he was struck on the head by a heavy cast
(07:56):
iron sausage grinder that fell off of a kitchen shelf,
and it was a fatal injury that, according to Hartzel's article,
was quote augmented by the crock of hot brine that
quote fell on him simultaneously. Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn't it. Yeah,
you would think so. And in fact, Bell's fourteen year
(08:16):
old foster daughter was said to have told people after
that that she had seen mama smack him on the
head with a cleaver, but later she denied this when
she was questioned by the corner. The corner and other
people actually were suspicious of this, but ultimately there was
no evidence, so they had to buy Bell's story and
she collected another thirty in insurance money. But after Peter
(08:38):
Gannis's death, Bell started taking out matrimonial ads in Scandinavian
newspaper She's looking for Love. She describes herself as good
looking quote stout quote womanly an example of how one
of these ads might read. Quote comely widow who owned
the large farm in one of the finest districts of
Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a
(09:01):
gentleman equally well provided with view of joining fortunes. No
replies by letter considered unless senders willing to follow answer
with personal visit. And probably my favorite part of these ads,
they'd end with lines like triflers need not apply. So
she wanted serious inquiries. She was not messing around, and
she didn't just want to chat either. Scrubs exactly. She
(09:24):
got several responses to these ads, and basically this is
how it worked. She started exchanging letters with a guy
and they would get to know each other. She'd tell
him how great her set up at the farm was,
tell him, you know, express some sort of affection or something,
tell him that she loved him, even make veiled sexual overtures.
But at the same time, she made it clear that
(09:45):
she expected these guys to bring something to the relationship,
namely cash. So after corresponding with the guy for a while,
she'd invite him to report, but encourage him to sell
all of his belongings and property before hand and bring
the clash along with them, Like I got the farm,
we just need the money, Come and bring it. Yeah,
But here's the catch. She didn't want any of these
(10:07):
guys to tell anyone close to them what they were doing.
So guys would show up run a few errands with
her usually one of those errands would be to the bank,
go to her house, and then they'd pretty much never
be seen again. And this happened with several men, including
a guy named John Moe another named ol Budsburg. Both
were from Wisconsin. And if anybody at all came looking
(10:29):
for these guys after the fact, Belle would just say
that she hadn't seen him, or oh, yeah, they were here,
but they left. And that's what she'd tell her suspicious
neighbors too, because they would see these men go in
and then never come out again, and she just say
they had left at night. They were gone already. And
in nineteen o six something happened that really people couldn't
(10:52):
ignore quite as much. Belle's foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared, but
Belle had an excuse there too. She told people that
Jenny had gone off to college in California, making something
of herself. It seemed, yeah, and it seemed the daughter
being missing was barely a hiccup for her. She just
kept up the letter writing, and Bell's Melman even said
that she wrote around ten letters a day and got
(11:12):
about the same number back in the mail, and on
days that she didn't get any letters, she would be
kind of upset, kind of cranky. So this all went
smoothly for her, relatively so, until she struck up a
correspondence with South Dakota farmer Andrew Helgaline. Presumably she used
the same strategy on him that she did with others.
His brother later found some of their letters, and several
of these have actually been preserved so people have translated them.
(11:36):
They were written in Norwegian, and and saw the kind
of methods that she used and talking to them exactly
so throughout the letters, Bill would constantly remind him about
bringing the money to report and give him all kinds
of advice about how to bring it to She would say,
you know, tell him the denomination of the bills to bring,
and tell him to sow it inside is underwear, and
(11:58):
that he again that he shouldn't tell any buddy about it,
and just kept sort of repeating these things throughout. And
Catherine Ramsland, who is a forensic psychologist who has written
about the Gunness case, says Bell's technique of regularly harping
on the money thing is actually a technique called seating
that's used in hypnosis. So she would try to implant
this idea of bringing her money into his unconscious mind
(12:21):
with constant repetition seems a little suspicious that, I mean,
I guess they were distracted almost by the sentiments that
were also in her letter, because she would appeal to
the needs of the immigrant man too. He was probably
lonely and homesick in South Dakota, and her talk of
Norway probably comforted him. They weren't They weren't all just
(12:43):
about the money, so they could relate, They could relate
to each other. It seemed like a promising relationship. So
after a year and a half of writing these letters
back and forth, Andrew came to Lport in early nineteen
o eight and then vanish, just like all of the
other guys. But what Bell wasn't banking on was his
brother Osle, who knew where Andrew had gone. So Andrew
(13:05):
must have broken one of those rules of Bells couldn't
tell anyone. Yeah, he broke that rule. I think he
didn't actually follow instructions either, as far as selling his
farm and you know, sewing the bills and his underwear
and all those things. He did have a lot of
money sent to the bank in Laporte, but he didn't
necessarily follow all the rules, but Osley was concerned and
he started writing to Bell. He really thought that his
(13:26):
brother was going to return in a week or so,
and so when he didn't, he he reached out, and
he didn't believe Bell's explanations that Andrew had simply gone away.
Around the same time, Bell had some other trouble. She
fired her hired hand Ray lamp Here, and he was
said to be in love with her. He was probably
jealous of all the guys coming around, who knows, but
(13:47):
he started making public scenes after he was let go,
and Bell tried to take legal action against him and
have him declared insane. So maybe it was a combination
of pressure from this as well as some increasing questions
from these relatives of the men who she had written to,
as well as questions from her neighbors. But on April seven,
nineteen o eight, Bell kept her kids home from school
(14:09):
and she went into town and saw her lawyer and
wrote her will. And she was also seen buying a
lot of kerosene, so went into town and did some
did some errands. Of course, from the intro we know
what happened next. Her house burned down, the bodies were found,
and ultimately they found between twelve and fourteen bodies, including
(14:30):
the body of the foster daughter, Jenny, who hadn't gone
off to college, and a couple of other unidentified children,
and there were several theories as to what happened with
the fire. Immediately after, a lot of people thought that
Belle had committed suicide because she was afraid that all
of her crimes were about to come to light that
(14:50):
they had been discovered. Land Fear, however, was the one
that the police immediately arrested. Belle had told her lawyer
the day before that she was afraid of him, and
he was charged with four counts of murder and with arson,
so it seemed initially that that maybe he was to blame.
It was found later, though, that the four people in
(15:11):
the cellar had died by means other than the fire.
They had probably been poisoned by Strict nine. They found
traces of strictnine and their bodies actually, but the bodies
had been mishandled so that they couldn't prove it. So
at lamp Here's trial in May eight he was only
convicted of arson. He died less than two years later
in prison, and on his deathbed he confessed to setting
(15:32):
the house on fire and to helping Bell escape. He
said the headless body belonged to a woman from Chicago
whom Bell had just hired as a housekeeper. She killed
the housekeeper and the three children and planted the bodies
to make it look like an accident. He also admitted
to helping Bell bury the other victims, although he said
that he wasn't involved in actually murdering them, But he
(15:53):
did describe how Bell did murder her victims. It turns
out that she poisoned a lot of them. Some of
um she left their bodies intact, some of them she butchered.
Some of the bodies she actually dropped into a vat
of hot water and then covered with quicklime, which is
a substance that kind of burns like acid. So I'm
(16:13):
assuming she did this to disguise the bodies. So who
knows how many of these details are actually accurate, but
this is probably the closest scenario to most to what
most people think happened as far as Bell. What happened
to Bell after the fire, Though nobody knows for certain
what happened to her after that or to her money,
historians estimate that she may have extorted up to ninety
(16:36):
dollars from her suitors, but the day after the fire,
there was only seven hundred in her Laport bank account.
So we mentioned in the beginning that Bell's story did
get a lot of attention at the time, and since
then she's become sort of a spooky local legend in
that part of Indiana. Neighbor has, for instance, claimed to
have seen her in the weeks after the fire, and
there have been numerous Bell sidings since then, but the
(17:00):
most notable one happened in Los Angeles in nine so
a considerable amount of time after after her disappearance, a
woman named Esther Carlson was accused of poisoning a man
she worked for named August Lindstrom for two thousand dollars
that he'd put in a joint bank account, and Carlson
died before this went to trial, but a couple of
(17:21):
people familiar with Bell they were Laport residents who were
in Los Angeles at the time, claimed a newspaper photo
of Carlson matched that of Bell, and others also confirmed
the connection, but there wasn't any definitive proof that this
was the same woman. Still up to her old murdering
ways all the way in l A. Yeah, So, I
(17:42):
mean the question is still out there. Did she die
in the fire or not. It's really tough to say.
I mean, people have wondered about this for years. Authorities
eventually found a dental bridge with one tooth in it
in the ruins of the fire that a dentist positively
identified as Bells, but historians were hardly convinced that this
And how can we I mean, if you were going
to fake your death and a fire, leave behind your
(18:03):
dental bridge. Yeah. Another point that I found in some
of my research was, Okay, Bell Gunness is obviously a psychopath.
She's killed all of these people, So is she really
going to care to pull out one tooth to leave
in the dental bridge? Probably not when you look at
it that way. People have not let this go though.
In two thousand seven, late two thousand seven, Suzanne Mackay,
(18:25):
a great granddaughter of Bell Gunnis's sister and one of
the last living relatives of the infamous serial killer, gave
a team of US researchers permission to exhume the headless
body that was found in the cellar of the torched farmhouse,
and they were going to compare the DNA from the
remains there to saliva samples from bell sealed letters. So
as far as we know, the tests were inconclusive with that.
(18:48):
And I think that they got a sample from a
DNA sample from the family member also, and we're trying
to test that as well. And I looked for more
recent updates on that, and I couldn't find anything more
recent in the last couple of years, So I don't
know for sure if they were able to find a
match or not. I think what they're really looking for
is to find the opposite of that, is to find
(19:10):
that there's not a match, because most people believe that
it was her that Bill's missing, and then you know,
the mystery will still stand. Where did she go? What
did she do? Yeah? Yeah, by Jinks. So I don't
want to Jinks because we still have a few things
left to say. Um, if you have any other fun
spooky topics, this is coming out right before October, I think,
(19:34):
so we're gonna be kicking off a gruesome well not
necessarily gruesome, it can just be spooky fun whatever Halloween
kind of topics. We love doing Halloween episodes. It's kind
of an October tradition at stuff you missed in history class.
So send us your suggestions and we would love to
have an October full of Halloween beam. Yeah, and so
(19:58):
don't send us a bell gun us up to it's
if you know anything else about the story as it's progressed,
or if you just have a favorite aspect of the
story that we didn't talk about. I mean, we always
try to cover as much as we can, but we
have time limits, so there are definitely details here that
we left out. Has a good conspiracy theory kind of story,
(20:18):
it really is. So we want to know what people think.
Please write us at history podcast at how stuff works
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(20:40):
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blame a chocolate boarding and I'm fired out
and this topic the topic of this episode was a
suggestion from listener Jesse, and I feel like I should
(00:22):
say that because it's such a gruesome story. I don't
want Sarah to be mad at me for picking it.
It does have a decapitated body. Yeah, that's true. Are
you putting that in the plus category? No, that's not
why I selected it. I selected it because it was
a listener's suggestion, and it is an interesting story. It's
a fascinating mystery, and you know how we love those.
(00:43):
It starts, at least for most of the world, this
is when it started with a fire that took place
the morning of April eight at a small farm just
outside of Laporte, Indiana, which was then a town of
about ten thousand, about sixty miles from Chicago, and the
farm was owned by a widow named Bell Gunness, and
her home there was completely destroyed by the fire. But
(01:06):
it was after the fire that the real mystery started.
So four charred bodies were found in the cellar and
three appeared to be the bodies of Gunnis's children, Myrtle Sorensen,
Lucy Sorensen, and Philip Gunnis, who were eleven, nine and
five years old, respectively. The fourth body, though, was kind
of a puzzle, and like I said, that's where the
(01:29):
mystery really started. Yeah. First, people assumed that the body
was Gunnesses. Makes sense, right, It's a woman's body, and
Gonnas live there, so you imagine that she would be
there with her kids. But there were a couple of
problems right off the bat. People thought that the body
seemed a little too small to be bell. She was
a woman of some stature. Let's say she was about
(01:51):
five eight and approximately two thirty pounds, and this body
appeared to belong to someone who was much shorter and lighter.
It was also missing head, making it even harder to
confirm the identity. I should correct my earlier statement. This
is why I thought you might have selected because of
the head. I know you like missing heads, but only
with the ned Kelly things. Okay, okay, well, and Henry
(02:12):
the fourth too. Whoops, Okay, never mind. But what really
made people suspicious about this this find was the arrival
of a man named awful Hell Glen who came on
the scene looking for his brother Andrew, and he said
that Andrew had been corresponding with Bell and insisted that
(02:33):
the police searched the property and a look for this
missing brother. What they found, though, was really disturbing, Andrew's
dismembered body plus the body of a lot of other people.
So listener Jesse commented on what a media storm the
story would have created if it had happened today. But
it actually started a bit of a media frenzy back
(02:53):
then too, as more bodies were dug up and it
became more and more clear that Bell had been a
ruthless kill or. Newspapers gave her catchy nicknames like the
Mistress of Murder Hill and Lady blue Beard. But who
was Bell Gunnis really and why and how did she
kill all of these people? And another question, which is
(03:15):
probably one of the main questions that people want to
know now, did she really die in that nine eight fire.
So we're gonna look at all of the stuff, but
we're gonna start with that first question. Who was Bell Gunnis?
So we don't know too much about Bell Gunnis's early life,
except that she was born in a small village in
Norway on November eighteen fifty nine, and her name was
(03:35):
originally Brynhild, Paul's daughter store Set, and her family was
very poor, and several sources actually suggest that her father
may have been a Stonemason and that she probably had
to work as a farm hand at an early age
to help her family make ends meet. But what we
do know is that sometime in or shortly after eight
(03:56):
bryn Hild immigrated to the United States in her early twenties,
specifically to Chicago, and changed her name to Bell. She
had a sister named Nelly Larson who had immigrated to
Chicago office, so she had a connection there. But she
again returned to pretty grueling work. Yeah, and again we
don't know too much about those first years in the
(04:17):
United States for Bell, but we do know that she
probably worked as a house servant, which would have been
pretty tough work, and she probably didn't like it very much,
because her sister was later quoted as saying, quote Bell
was crazy for money, and working as a house servant
would not have afforded her much of that. By about
eighteen eighty four, she married a man named Max Mad's
(04:38):
Sorenson who was also a Norwegian immigrant, but that wouldn't
have really been her ticket to instant wealth either though.
He was a department store detective and later worked for
the Chicago Railroad. In the eight nineties, they opened up
a confectioner shop in downtown Chicago, but that wasn't very successful.
It was, however, ensured. Oh indeed, the building and actually
(05:00):
really burned down around a year into their business venture,
and after that they were able to collect a little
bit of insurance money. Maybe it doesn't seem like such
a big deal on the surface, but this kicked off
a pattern for Bell that would probably raise a few
red flags today. In eight the Sorenson's house also burned down,
and they collected insurance money for that, and the couple's
(05:20):
first two kids, who were also insured, died in infancy,
officially of acute colitis, but now looking back, people say
the symptoms are similar to if they had been poisoned. Okay, so,
even if you look at all of that is just
really really bad luck or really weird coincidence, what happens
next has to make you a little bit suspicious at least,
(05:44):
so mad Sorenson dies on July n which just happens
to be the one day that to life insurance policies
from different mutual associations overlapped. Officially, the cause of death
was heart failure, but his symptoms actually indicated strychnine poisoning.
And the insurance payout because of those two policies was
(06:06):
pretty huge eight thousand, five hundred dollars, and that was
quite a large sum for the time, and it said
that Bell tried to go collect it just a day
after the funeral, so she was certainly not playing a
part of the grieving widow. It was probably suspicious that
there wasn't an autopsy. So Bell got the insurance money
and went on her way. She did. She used the
(06:28):
money actually to buy the farm on the outskirts of Laport,
and she moved there with three kids, Jenny, Myrtle, and Lucy.
And just an aside here about the kids. It's generally
accepted that Jenny, whose full name was probably Jenny Olson,
was a foster child, but some say that none of
Bell's children were her own. According to an article by
Ted Hartzel in American History, Bill's sister, Nellie Larson, once
(06:51):
said that Bell never had any children of her own,
though she would at times have as many as twelve
children in her care, So just an interesting thing to
think about as we go on. I mean, maybe there
was some money associated with fostering children, you know, maybe
you got some money from the government for that or something. Um.
You know, it's something that people don't focus on the
most when they're talking about Bell Gunnis, but it's something
(07:12):
that stuck out to me definitely in her story. It's unusual.
So in Bell married again and her second husband, this
time as a widower and a butcher by trade named
Peter Gunnis, who was also a native of Norway. And
Peter Gunnis came to the marriage with two kids already.
One was an infant named Jenny, and she mysteriously died
(07:33):
just a week after the wedding when she was home
alone with Bell, and the other was a five year
old girl. And after that incident with the baby, she
was removed from her father and Bell's care and taken
away by her uncle to Wisconsin. Peter Gunnis didn't really
last that much longer. Only eight months after the wedding,
he was struck on the head by a heavy cast
(07:56):
iron sausage grinder that fell off of a kitchen shelf,
and it was a fatal injury that, according to Hartzel's article,
was quote augmented by the crock of hot brine that
quote fell on him simultaneously. Sounds kind of suspicious, doesn't it. Yeah,
you would think so. And in fact, Bell's fourteen year
(08:16):
old foster daughter was said to have told people after
that that she had seen mama smack him on the
head with a cleaver, but later she denied this when
she was questioned by the corner. The corner and other
people actually were suspicious of this, but ultimately there was
no evidence, so they had to buy Bell's story and
she collected another thirty in insurance money. But after Peter
(08:38):
Gannis's death, Bell started taking out matrimonial ads in Scandinavian
newspaper She's looking for Love. She describes herself as good
looking quote stout quote womanly an example of how one
of these ads might read. Quote comely widow who owned
the large farm in one of the finest districts of
Laporte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a
(09:01):
gentleman equally well provided with view of joining fortunes. No
replies by letter considered unless senders willing to follow answer
with personal visit. And probably my favorite part of these ads,
they'd end with lines like triflers need not apply. So
she wanted serious inquiries. She was not messing around, and
she didn't just want to chat either. Scrubs exactly. She
(09:24):
got several responses to these ads, and basically this is
how it worked. She started exchanging letters with a guy
and they would get to know each other. She'd tell
him how great her set up at the farm was,
tell him, you know, express some sort of affection or something,
tell him that she loved him, even make veiled sexual overtures.
But at the same time, she made it clear that
(09:45):
she expected these guys to bring something to the relationship,
namely cash. So after corresponding with the guy for a while,
she'd invite him to report, but encourage him to sell
all of his belongings and property before hand and bring
the clash along with them, Like I got the farm,
we just need the money, Come and bring it. Yeah,
But here's the catch. She didn't want any of these
(10:07):
guys to tell anyone close to them what they were doing.
So guys would show up run a few errands with
her usually one of those errands would be to the bank,
go to her house, and then they'd pretty much never
be seen again. And this happened with several men, including
a guy named John Moe another named ol Budsburg. Both
were from Wisconsin. And if anybody at all came looking
(10:29):
for these guys after the fact, Belle would just say
that she hadn't seen him, or oh, yeah, they were here,
but they left. And that's what she'd tell her suspicious
neighbors too, because they would see these men go in
and then never come out again, and she just say
they had left at night. They were gone already. And
in nineteen o six something happened that really people couldn't
(10:52):
ignore quite as much. Belle's foster daughter, Jenny, disappeared, but
Belle had an excuse there too. She told people that
Jenny had gone off to college in California, making something
of herself. It seemed, yeah, and it seemed the daughter
being missing was barely a hiccup for her. She just
kept up the letter writing, and Bell's Melman even said
that she wrote around ten letters a day and got
(11:12):
about the same number back in the mail, and on
days that she didn't get any letters, she would be
kind of upset, kind of cranky. So this all went
smoothly for her, relatively so, until she struck up a
correspondence with South Dakota farmer Andrew Helgaline. Presumably she used
the same strategy on him that she did with others.
His brother later found some of their letters, and several
of these have actually been preserved so people have translated them.
(11:36):
They were written in Norwegian, and and saw the kind
of methods that she used and talking to them exactly
so throughout the letters, Bill would constantly remind him about
bringing the money to report and give him all kinds
of advice about how to bring it to She would say,
you know, tell him the denomination of the bills to bring,
and tell him to sow it inside is underwear, and
(11:58):
that he again that he shouldn't tell any buddy about it,
and just kept sort of repeating these things throughout. And
Catherine Ramsland, who is a forensic psychologist who has written
about the Gunness case, says Bell's technique of regularly harping
on the money thing is actually a technique called seating
that's used in hypnosis. So she would try to implant
this idea of bringing her money into his unconscious mind
(12:21):
with constant repetition seems a little suspicious that, I mean,
I guess they were distracted almost by the sentiments that
were also in her letter, because she would appeal to
the needs of the immigrant man too. He was probably
lonely and homesick in South Dakota, and her talk of
Norway probably comforted him. They weren't They weren't all just
(12:43):
about the money, so they could relate, They could relate
to each other. It seemed like a promising relationship. So
after a year and a half of writing these letters
back and forth, Andrew came to Lport in early nineteen
o eight and then vanish, just like all of the
other guys. But what Bell wasn't banking on was his
brother Osle, who knew where Andrew had gone. So Andrew
(13:05):
must have broken one of those rules of Bells couldn't
tell anyone. Yeah, he broke that rule. I think he
didn't actually follow instructions either, as far as selling his
farm and you know, sewing the bills and his underwear
and all those things. He did have a lot of
money sent to the bank in Laporte, but he didn't
necessarily follow all the rules, but Osley was concerned and
he started writing to Bell. He really thought that his
(13:26):
brother was going to return in a week or so,
and so when he didn't, he he reached out, and
he didn't believe Bell's explanations that Andrew had simply gone away.
Around the same time, Bell had some other trouble. She
fired her hired hand Ray lamp Here, and he was
said to be in love with her. He was probably
jealous of all the guys coming around, who knows, but
(13:47):
he started making public scenes after he was let go,
and Bell tried to take legal action against him and
have him declared insane. So maybe it was a combination
of pressure from this as well as some increasing questions
from these relatives of the men who she had written to,
as well as questions from her neighbors. But on April seven,
nineteen o eight, Bell kept her kids home from school
(14:09):
and she went into town and saw her lawyer and
wrote her will. And she was also seen buying a
lot of kerosene, so went into town and did some
did some errands. Of course, from the intro we know
what happened next. Her house burned down, the bodies were found,
and ultimately they found between twelve and fourteen bodies, including
(14:30):
the body of the foster daughter, Jenny, who hadn't gone
off to college, and a couple of other unidentified children,
and there were several theories as to what happened with
the fire. Immediately after, a lot of people thought that
Belle had committed suicide because she was afraid that all
of her crimes were about to come to light that
(14:50):
they had been discovered. Land Fear, however, was the one
that the police immediately arrested. Belle had told her lawyer
the day before that she was afraid of him, and
he was charged with four counts of murder and with arson,
so it seemed initially that that maybe he was to blame.
It was found later, though, that the four people in
(15:11):
the cellar had died by means other than the fire.
They had probably been poisoned by Strict nine. They found
traces of strictnine and their bodies actually, but the bodies
had been mishandled so that they couldn't prove it. So
at lamp Here's trial in May eight he was only
convicted of arson. He died less than two years later
in prison, and on his deathbed he confessed to setting
(15:32):
the house on fire and to helping Bell escape. He
said the headless body belonged to a woman from Chicago
whom Bell had just hired as a housekeeper. She killed
the housekeeper and the three children and planted the bodies
to make it look like an accident. He also admitted
to helping Bell bury the other victims, although he said
that he wasn't involved in actually murdering them, But he
(15:53):
did describe how Bell did murder her victims. It turns
out that she poisoned a lot of them. Some of
um she left their bodies intact, some of them she butchered.
Some of the bodies she actually dropped into a vat
of hot water and then covered with quicklime, which is
a substance that kind of burns like acid. So I'm
(16:13):
assuming she did this to disguise the bodies. So who
knows how many of these details are actually accurate, but
this is probably the closest scenario to most to what
most people think happened as far as Bell. What happened
to Bell after the fire, Though nobody knows for certain
what happened to her after that or to her money,
historians estimate that she may have extorted up to ninety
(16:36):
dollars from her suitors, but the day after the fire,
there was only seven hundred in her Laport bank account.
So we mentioned in the beginning that Bell's story did
get a lot of attention at the time, and since
then she's become sort of a spooky local legend in
that part of Indiana. Neighbor has, for instance, claimed to
have seen her in the weeks after the fire, and
there have been numerous Bell sidings since then, but the
(17:00):
most notable one happened in Los Angeles in nine so
a considerable amount of time after after her disappearance, a
woman named Esther Carlson was accused of poisoning a man
she worked for named August Lindstrom for two thousand dollars
that he'd put in a joint bank account, and Carlson
died before this went to trial, but a couple of
(17:21):
people familiar with Bell they were Laport residents who were
in Los Angeles at the time, claimed a newspaper photo
of Carlson matched that of Bell, and others also confirmed
the connection, but there wasn't any definitive proof that this
was the same woman. Still up to her old murdering
ways all the way in l A. Yeah, So, I
(17:42):
mean the question is still out there. Did she die
in the fire or not. It's really tough to say.
I mean, people have wondered about this for years. Authorities
eventually found a dental bridge with one tooth in it
in the ruins of the fire that a dentist positively
identified as Bells, but historians were hardly convinced that this
And how can we I mean, if you were going
to fake your death and a fire, leave behind your
(18:03):
dental bridge. Yeah. Another point that I found in some
of my research was, Okay, Bell Gunness is obviously a psychopath.
She's killed all of these people, So is she really
going to care to pull out one tooth to leave
in the dental bridge? Probably not when you look at
it that way. People have not let this go though.
In two thousand seven, late two thousand seven, Suzanne Mackay,
(18:25):
a great granddaughter of Bell Gunnis's sister and one of
the last living relatives of the infamous serial killer, gave
a team of US researchers permission to exhume the headless
body that was found in the cellar of the torched farmhouse,
and they were going to compare the DNA from the
remains there to saliva samples from bell sealed letters. So
as far as we know, the tests were inconclusive with that.
(18:48):
And I think that they got a sample from a
DNA sample from the family member also, and we're trying
to test that as well. And I looked for more
recent updates on that, and I couldn't find anything more
recent in the last couple of years, So I don't
know for sure if they were able to find a
match or not. I think what they're really looking for
is to find the opposite of that, is to find
(19:10):
that there's not a match, because most people believe that
it was her that Bill's missing, and then you know,
the mystery will still stand. Where did she go? What
did she do? Yeah? Yeah, by Jinks. So I don't
want to Jinks because we still have a few things
left to say. Um, if you have any other fun
spooky topics, this is coming out right before October, I think,
(19:34):
so we're gonna be kicking off a gruesome well not
necessarily gruesome, it can just be spooky fun whatever Halloween
kind of topics. We love doing Halloween episodes. It's kind
of an October tradition at stuff you missed in history class.
So send us your suggestions and we would love to
have an October full of Halloween beam. Yeah, and so
(19:58):
don't send us a bell gun us up to it's
if you know anything else about the story as it's progressed,
or if you just have a favorite aspect of the
story that we didn't talk about. I mean, we always
try to cover as much as we can, but we
have time limits, so there are definitely details here that
we left out. Has a good conspiracy theory kind of story,
(20:18):
it really is. So we want to know what people think.
Please write us at history podcast at how stuff works
dot com, or you can look us up on Facebook
or on Twitter at Myston History. And if you want
to learn more about people kind of like Bill Gunneths,
we do have an article on serial killers. You can
look for it by searching for how s serial killers
work on our homepage at www dot how stuff work
(20:40):
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
topics because it how stuff works dot com.
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